The Children’s Charity Coalition is calling on the government to “turbocharge long-term investment in children’s social care” in response, to help councils rebuild lost early help services.
The figure, charting declining spending since 2010/11, has been revealed in research carried out by think tank Pro Bono Economics for the coalition, whose members include NSPCC, National Children’s Bureau and Barnardo’s.
They want to see Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ forthcoming Spending Review to invest a “minimum” of £2.6bn over the next four years in children’s social care.
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While they welcome the government’s pledge last month to invest a further £270m for early intervention services through the Families First Programme “even with this short-term increase, spending will continue to fall behind”.
Children living in areas of disadvantage are being hardest hit by a reduction in spending on early help, the research warns.
Spending per child in the most deprived parts of the country has been cut in half, while in more affluent areas the cut has been by less than a third.
One senior council representative surveyed said: “When I first came into the local authority we had a youth service of about 55 full-time staff, and an army of seasonal staff.
“We had great youth provision, daytime, evenings and weekends. The funding for that service has been stripped out. So now we have no youth workers at all, zero.”
Pro Bono Economics' analysis also details that spending on children’s residential care is currently at a record high of £3bn.
The coalition warns that “councils remain locked in a financial downward spiral”, with cuts to early help leading to an increase in families reaching crisis point and more children being taken into care.
One council head of service surveyed said: “Things like children coming into care…are reaching crisis point where there's too much demand.
“And when you think about why there's too much demand, it's because for the last 10-15 years, the prevention services haven't been there.”
Report author and Pro Bono Economics senior policy analyst Jack Larkham said that the analysis “shines a much-needed light on the scale and distribution of cuts over the last decade and a half”.
He added: “While it's clear that things are no longer getting worse, it is also evident that there is a long way to go before we can say things have got decisively better.
"Significant shifts in central government policy in recent years have contributed to this change. But any emerging recovery risks being blown off course by a failure to support a much-needed overhaul of children’s services with sufficient and patient long-term investment in early intervention services.”
National Children’s Bureau chief executive Anna Feuchtwang said: “The Chancellor has the opportunity in her Spending Review to break this destructive cycle once and for all.”
